had almost withdrawn from public life. He had no heart
for the quarrel, and did not care greatly to exert himself. At the
bottom, perhaps, he thought that the Italians were in the right. The
Senate discovered that they were helpless, and must come to terms if
they would escape destruction. They abandoned the original point of
difference, and they offered to open the franchise to every Italian
state south of the Po, which had not taken arms, or which returned
immediately to its allegiance. The war had broken out for a definite
cause. When the cause was removed no reason remained for its
continuance.

The panting Senate was thus able to breathe again. The war continued,
but under better auspices. Sound material could now be collected again
for the army. Marius being in the background, the chosen knight of the
aristocracy, Lucius Sulla, whose fame in the Cimbrian war had been
only second to that of his commander's, came at once to the front. Too
late the democratic leaders repented of their folly in encouraging the
Senate to refuse the franchise to the Italians. The Italians, they
began to perceive, would be their surest political allies. Caius
Gracchus had been right after all. The Roman democracy must make haste
to offer the Italians more than all which the Senate was ready to
concede to them. Together they could make an end of misrule, and place
Marius once more at their head.

Much of this was perhaps the scheming passion of revolution; much of
it was legitimate indignation, penitent for its errors and anxious to
atone for them. Marius had his personal grievances. The aristocrats
were stealing from him even his military reputation, and claiming for
Sulla the capture of Jugurtha. He was willing, perhaps anxious, to
take the Eastern command. Sulpicius Rufus, once a champion of the
Senate and the most brilliant orator in Rome, went over to the people
in the excitement. Rufus was chosen tribune, and at once proposed to
enfranchise the remainder of Italy.

But Sulla was not so easily got rid of. It was no time for nice
considerations. He had formed an army in Campania out of the legions
which had served against the Italians. He had made his soldiers
devoted to him. They were ready to go anywhere and do anything which
Sulla bade them. After so many murders, and so many commotions, the
constitution had lost its sacred character; a popular assembly was, of
all conceivable bodies, the least fit to govern an empire; and in
S